Grow into passions, and subdue the mind. (V, 4)

Further each commission of sin causes progressive loss of grace, without
which man cannot act rightly. In prison Beverly is incapable of prayer
("I cannot pray--Despair has laid his iron hand upon me, and seal'd me
for perdition..."). However, a benevolent deity touches him with the
finger of grace, enabling him to repent ("I wish'd for ease, a moment's
ease, that cool repentance and contrition might soften vengeance"). He
can now pray for mercy and in his dying moments is vouchsafed assurance
of forgiveness ("Yet Heaven is gracious--I ask'd for hope, as the bright
presage of forgiveness, and like a light, blazing thro' darkness, it
came and chear'd me...").

In this aspect Moore is working along the lines laid down by Hill, but
there is a significant difference, attributable perhaps to the weakening
of orthodox theology and the spreading influence of the Shaftesburian
school of ethical theorists. In the older theology, man's progressive
loss of grace correspondingly releases his natural propensity for evil,
and working in these concepts neither Hill nor Lillo hesitated to show
his hero descending to murder. Moore, influenced perhaps by the ethical
sentiments of the day, compromised his theological concepts and
permitted his hero no really evil act (excluding of course his suicide),
and stressed instead Beverly's mistaken trust in Stukely, who is, as
Elton has pointed out, a "Mandevillian man" (_Survey of English
Literature: 1730-1760_, I, 329-30).

There is another significant difference between the two plays which
reflects the development of religious thought in the first half of the
eighteenth century. Commenting on the too-late arrival of the news of
the uncle's death, Elton remarks that "this _too-lateness_... which